E30M3 – E30M3

Recommendation: ☀☁☁

How do you say E30M3? “Eat me”? I’ve been saying “eat me” in my head the whole time.1

Released on Christmas Day 2016, the eponymous album by E30M3 is a six-track release from 404Jackpot – an extremely diverse label from Paris, France. As far as I can tell, this is the only release from this particular artist/project – but knowing the pseudonymous world of vaporwave and its related genres, it’s entirely possible that E30M3 could have one or several other aliases floating around the Internet. Each track on this album has its own associated artwork that is a different take on the car on the main cover, often with some minor glitch art texturing. All of these artworks are available with the album download, and they’re automatically tagged to their respective tracks.2

This work is high-intensity hardvapour that’s accurately represented in its promotional blurb with the line “BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM ᕙ༼*◕_◕*༽ᕤ “. It starts out simple enough: the first minute of “LNP” is shimmery ambiance with vaporwave sampling (akin to the ambient-esque surrealism of the hypnagogic drift subgenre), but after a brief pause it’s all fast-bpm bass thumps. E30M3 is a bit different from works on labels such as HVRF or Antifur in the latter’s early days in that noise music is all but entirely absent; the album is certainly a loudly-produced one with hard-hitting gabber percussion, but it’s not distorted in the way of stuff by Eric Stratos or the Krokodil Krew.

(There are a couple other vaporwave influences: “Chasing” and “TEKNO86” have some pitch-/tempo-shifted vocals akin to the beginning of “LNP”. Ironically, “Vaporave” is the track least associated with vaporwave in its sub-two minutes of techno craziness.)